The endless Bush jokes underline his questionable 'legitimacy' - in electoral terms but also in terms of a man living off class capital, off the symbolic indemnities provided by the Name of the Father. His authority comes from his background, Name, his office - anywhere but from himself. He is on the train without a ticket, looking round nervously, in unguarded moments the critics detect the shifty anxiety of the imposter; they stress, of course, these jokers, his uneasy relationship to language, they invoke the image of a man suddenly hypnotized, trapped in indecision, on the morning when his country was under attack; they stress his vacant, incurious air, ' as ignorant of the world as he is indifferent to it', he is bombing a country he could not locate on a map and so on. None of this makes a difference. Au contraire, it consolidates his posiiton..
from Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology:
.. let us mention only the 1986 Austrian presidential campaign, with the controversial figure of Waldheim at its centre. Starting from the assumption that Waldheim was attracting voters because of his great-statesman image, leftisits put the emphasis of their campaign on proving to the public that not only is Waldheim a man with a dubious past (probably involved in war crimes) but also a man who is not prepared to confront his past, a man who evades crucial questions concerning it - in short, a man wose basic feature is a refusal to 'work through' the traumatic past. What they overlooked was that it wsa precisely this feature with whcih the majority of centrist voters identified. Post-war Austria is a country whose very existence is based on a refusal to 'work through' its traumatic Nazi past - proving that Waldheim was evading confrontation with his past emphasized the exact trait-of-identificaiton of the majority of voters.
The theoretical lesson to be learnt from this is that the trait-of-identification can also be a certain failure, weakness, guilt of the other, so that by pointing out the failure we can unwittingly reinforce the identification. Rightist ideology is particularly adroit at offering people weakness or guilt as an identifying trait: we find traces of this even with Hitler. In his public appearances, people specifically identified themselves with what were hysterical outbursts of impotent rage - that is, they 'recognised' themselves in this hysterical acting out.
The example of Hitler is an interesting one. Was it not Benjamin who saw in German fascism the early aestheticisation of politics, the transformation of the public into transfixed spectators. He was among the first to see the curious Hitler-Chaplin mirroring*. If Chaplin was the floundering, frustrated 'little guy', Hitler was his bizarro double and specular confirmation, a rage-inflated 'huge imago' in Auden's words. The Frankfurt School, who followed up and developed some of these suggestions were, and are, sometimes accused of conflating the psychological and political structures of Fascism with those of Liberal democracy. They did not conflate them as such, but thought that extreme phenomena could lay bare the secret truth of the Norm, the median. Benjamin, for example, noted (in a different context) that "ideas come to life only when extremes are assembled around them" and that "From the point of view of the philosophy of art the extremes are necessary". The pathological retrospectively illuminates the normal.
If German fascism allowed Benjamin to see the coming spectacularisation of politics, this accounts partly for the popularity of Benjamin among critical theorists and philsophers. It represents not so much a nostalgia for a time before spectacular society, but nostalgia for a time when it could actually be seen and truly experienced in its difference and novelty. It is the gaze of Benjamin, his very ability to see what it for us the medium within which we move, that is the object of our nostalgia.
Bush, having borrowed his authority from others, immediately delegates it others. He acts on behalf of or has others act on his behalf; he is merely the zero point of these deferrals and displacements. Lacking authority, he lacks also actual political convictions, interests. He is, it seems, the exact opposite of the passionate intensity of A.H. But this opposition, which is genuine, exists also within a theatrical and 'specular' form of politics which is specifically modern and which Benjamin and also Adorno had begun to understand and which Debord, in a different way, brought to concentrated theoretical clarity.
n.b, Adam Kotsko offers a 'Lacanian reading' of Bush, here:
Lacan would note that Bush exemplifies the modern phenomenon of the "master-fool." This is a master who does not sieze power, but rather abdicates himself of responsibility, simply rubber-stamping "reality." Accusing Bush in person is always awkward, because he is presented as a complete tool of the ideologues who are really running things. Even a sharply critical article on Bush always ends up accusing the knavish underlings more than Bush himself, and Bush, when called upon to explain himself, can always, justifiably, claim that he was just doing what he was told. Even the master, in our modern age, is a parasite on real power, which is always somewhere else and is never my responsibility.